


Gleam and Glow

by akaparalian



Category: Voltron: Legendary Defender
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fairy Tale, Alternate Universe - Tangled (2010) Fusion, Fluff, M/M, Pre-Relationship
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-09-27
Updated: 2018-09-27
Packaged: 2019-07-18 11:00:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,963
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16117034
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/akaparalian/pseuds/akaparalian
Summary: “His hand glows,” Keith mutters, staring into the middle distance, brows furrowed in a frown. Distantly, he can hear Shiro talking, too, celebrating their narrow escape from the palace guards who’d ambushed them, and their evenmorenarrow escape from being trapped in a rapidly-flooding cave. Without Shiro’s glowing hand, they almost certainly couldn’t have been able to find their way out. Still.His hand glows.“Why does his hand glow?”





	Gleam and Glow

**Author's Note:**

> For the square "Healing" of my Sheith card for VLD Bingo! I'm only two away from my first bingo, whoooo. Events like this are the perfect excuse for engaging in self-indulgent stuff like this, if you ask me. :')
> 
> Come find me on [Twitter](http://twitter.com/akaparalian) or [Tumblr](http://floralegia.tumblr.com) if you like!

When he stumbles up onto the riverbank, Keith gives himself a few seconds to freak out. He thinks he’s earned that.

Okay. So Shiro’s arm glows. So Shiro, the guy he semi-rescued from a weird lonely tower in the woods, has an arm that glows when he sings. So the shiny metal limb isn’t just a prosthetic — it’s _magic_. That certainly a much better explanation for how it functions so much like a real arm than the excuse Shiro had fed him before about his mother being good with mechanical things. (Clearly, Keith thinks, she’s good with _something_ if she made that arm, but he really doubts it’s mechanics.) This is fine. This is _all_ fine. None of this is out of the ordinary at all.

...He might actually need more than a few seconds of freaking out before he can process this.

“His hand glows,” Keith mutters, staring into the middle distance, brows furrowed in a frown. Distantly, he can hear Shiro talking, too, celebrating their narrow escape from the palace guards who’d ambushed them, and their even _more_ narrow escape from being trapped in a rapidly-flooding cave. Without Shiro’s glowing hand, they almost certainly couldn’t have been able to find their way out. Still. _His hand glows._ “Why does his hand glow?”

“Keith.”

“It glowed when he sang,” Keith continues, not even really realizing that his thoughts are bolting through his mind so fast that they’re leaking out of his mouth. “Why would _singing_ be the trigger?”

“Keith…”

“I don’t know shit about magic, but _singing?_ How does that even work? And why does it _glow?”_

_“Keith!”_

He blinks. His brain snaps to the present, and he realizes Shiro’s been trying to get his attention. Shiro looks a little amused, a little wry, a little nervous; suddenly, Keith remembers waking up in that tower after Shiro had knocked him out, and how his voice had shaken slightly when he’d asked, _Why are you here?_

Keith knows enough unsavory people to be able to think of about a dozen who’d be very, very interested in Shiro’s magic glowing hand right off the top of his head.

“It... it doesn’t _just_ glow,” Shiro says, hesitating just a moment more. “You got hurt, right?”

That _is_ right. Keith cut his palm on a rock trying to get out of the cave. He’s been so distracted by the glowing hand thing that he had almost forgotten. “Uh. Yeah.”

“Come here.” Shiro holds out his hand — the metal, magical, glowing one. Keith hesitates, wary, because Shiro’s been great and all, he seems like a nice guy and a bit naive to boot, but Keith hasn’t gotten this far in life by sticking his fingers directly into inexplicable, unnatural things.

Except that that’s mostly because he’s never really come into contact with inexplicable, unnatural things like this before, and he _has_ gotten this far in life by, more generally, going with his gut. And his gut likes Shiro. A lot. More than he’s willing to admit, really. So Keith takes his hand.

Shiro seems to relax a little when their fingers touch, like he’d been worried about something and the touch of Keith’s hand took that worry away. He sits, pulling Keith to the ground with him, and settling cross-legged on the grass. Then he carefully covers the gash on Keith’s palm with his own fingers; they look kind of huge against Keith’s, which Keith elects to ignore.

And then Shiro starts to sing.

It’s much less urgent than he had been in the cave, giving Keith a chance to actually notice his voice, which is good, because noticing his voice gives Keith’s brain something to focus on amidst all the weirdness that’s descended on his life ever since he accidentally broke into Shiro’s tower and only seems to be accelerating. Shiro’s voice is warm and smooth, full of care; even though he’s singing in a language Keith doesn’t recognize, made of unfamiliar and meaningless sounds, it feels like he can get a sense of the meaning just from the timbre of Shiro’s voice. He’s pleading for something, his mouth rounding out the unrecognizable syllables as his eyelashes flutter, his eyes focused downward on Keith’s hand.

Keith follows his gaze and can’t help the way his mouth falls open as he gasps in shock. Obviously, he knew the glowing was part of this equation, but somehow it still takes him by surprise. The pale silver light had been so shocking in the cave, his brain struggling to make sense of it, that it had seemed almost harsh; here, it’s softer, reflecting up onto Shiro’s face and making him seem to shimmer. There’s a slight purple undertone to it, Keith notices, and the light seems to dapple and shift as though it’s alive.

And then, as Shiro’s voice seems to swell, Keith feels a pull against his skin where their hands are pressed together. His cut tingles a little, hidden from view. Keith bites his lip, wincing slightly at the odd sensation.

Shiro slowly stops singing, holding the last note out for several long seconds with his eyes still fixed on their joined hands. As his voice fades out, so do the weird feelings in Keith’s hand, the tingling and the pull, and so does the lilac-silver light. Slowly, so slowly, Shiro pulls away.

Keith can feel it even before he looks, but he looks anyway, just to visually confirm what he already knows: his hand is healed. There’s not even a scar. Shiro’s magic, glowing, _healing_ hand has made it look like he never got cut at all.

“That’s got to come in handy,” he says, a little dazed. Shit. Just _what_ has he gotten himself into with this guy?

“That’s one way to put it,” Shiro agrees, quirking a smile at Keith’s unintentional pun. After a moment, though, his expression gets serious again. “You’re not freaking out, are you?” 

“I’ll let you know once I figure that out,” Keith tells him truthfully. “But for now, let’s go with ‘probably.’”

“Okay,” Shiro says, biting his lip. “I guess that’s fair. Um. Is there any way I can… help you not freak out?”

Keith considers that. He’s already feeling a little less freaked the more he has time to process all of this crazy mess. “I think… I think understanding it will help?” 

“I can try to answer any questions you have, but to be honest, I don’t know a lot myself,” Shiro admits. “I don’t remember ever not having it.”

“You said your mother gave it to you?”

“Yes,” Shiro says, and it’s only when he says it that Keith realizes fully how _weird_ that is, or at minimum, unusual. What kind of person has that kind of power? “I got sick as a baby. Some kind of infection in my arm. Mother says I had seizures. The arm… there was no way to heal it, so she had to remove it or I would have died.”

Something in Keith’s gut clenches at the casual way Shiro says ‘remove it.’ The thought of a mother having to do that to her own child, even if the alternative was death, turns his stomach. 

“And then she… gave you that one?”

“Yes,” Shiro says again, looking down at the arm in question, clenching and unclenching his fist slowly. “She’s… never fully explained it to me, because she says it’s too complicated, but the metal it’s made of is the source of the magic. It’s grown with me, and it’s impossible to cut or dent or burn, as far as I can tell.”

“And it glows,” Keith adds slowly. “And heals things. When you sing to it.”

“It does, yes,” Shiro agrees.

“Okay.” Keith considers all of this for a moment more, then repeats, “Okay. I think I’m done freaking out, for now, at least.”

Shiro lets out a deep sigh of relief, smiling at him a little tentatively. “Well, good,” he says, folding his hands together in his lap and peering up at Keith through his fringe. ”I mean — I get why you freaked out. I know my arm is… special. Unique. That’s why my mother is so protective, you know?”

“Protective. Right.” Keith’s starting to get a weirder and weirder feeling about Shiro’s mother, actually. That same gut instinct that told him to take Shiro’s hand — hell, the same gut instinct that led him to Shiro’s tower in the first place — is increasingly insisting that something about the lady sounds incredibly fishy. Shiro talks about her with no small degree of affection, but then in the same breath he’ll use that affection to excuse away things that make Keith’s skin crawl, like, for example, locking your son away in a tower for twenty years so that people don’t steal the magic arm that you gave him.

Maybe now isn’t the time to bring that up, though. They just had a near-death experience, and then had a heart-to-heart about Shiro’s glowing hand, so maybe Keith should wait on the “So, is your mother actually a major creep?” conversation — not least because he has no idea how to breach that subject without just pissing Shiro off, probably.

And it can wait another day. They have time, still, before Keith will have to take Shiro back to that lonely old tower. He can take him to the citadel first, show him the colors and the lively market squares and the bustle of the people, watch him light up the way he lights up with every new thing he comes across. Keith’s just selfish enough to want to give him that and see how he reacts before he inevitably ruins whatever tentative thing is blooming between them by barging in and bluntly sticking his nose into places it isn’t wanted.

So instead of charging right into the mess that seems to be lingering just under the surface of Shiro’s relationship with his mother, Keith just says, “It’s been quite a day. Why don’t we set up camp?”

“That’s a _great_ idea,” Shiro says immediately, jumping to his feet. “I’m going to go look for firewood.”

“You do that,” Keith agrees, amused at his eagerness, but before the words are out of his mouth, Shiro’s already gone, humming as he heads toward the woods further back from the river than where he and Keith had been sitting.Yesterday, Keith would have been a little worried about him going off alone, but today’s events have taught him better. Shiro has a mean right hook.

That doesn’t stop Keith from watching him go, though, following his every move until he disappears among the trees, and very firmly refusing to look too deeply into his own motivations for doing so. He’s not ready to put a name to them yet. Soon, maybe, but not now. He’ll give himself just a little longer on that conversation, too.

He hasn’t known Shiro for long, but it’s long enough for Keit to know that if he’s going to do this, he’s going to do it right. Though he’s not sure what he has that can match the magic glowing hand reveal. He’ll have to pull out the big guns.

And then, unbidden, the memory of Shiro’s wistful voice and the expression of pure longing he’d had while talking about the floating lanterns pops into his mind, and Keith suddenly realizes he just might know _exactly_ where, when, and how to have that second conversation with Shiro — the conversation about everything he feels, everything he wants, everything he hopes they can be, somehow.

He may not have any actual magic, but, Keith thinks as he gets up to start making camp for the night, for someone as special as Shiro, he can still do his best to make things magical.


End file.
